Part VI of the Sunstone Classics series.

Neal Chandler is a former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and former director of the Creative Writing Program at Cleveland State University. This article is excerpted from a Sunstone article published in 2004. It starts on page 42 of issue 135. 

As a new missionary, I arrived in Hamburg in September of 1961. I went to Emden, a small harbor town just across the mouth of the Ems River from Holland. The people were East Fresians, related by blood and proximity to the Dutch. They were notoriously taciturn and skeptical and difficult just to talk to, let alone to convert. Their standard and surely favorite response to religious faith, if you could get them to respond at all, was a question. “Do you want to know what I believe?” they would ask and plod on in dialect. “I believe that a pound of meat makes a decent soup. And that’s all.” There was defiant satisfaction in this pronouncement.

If we could really get someone to talk to us, to be open and frank—which was even rarer, particularly since we lacked the cultural leverage of springing for a beer—he or she would surely recount horrific experiences from the war, then only sixteen years past and fresh on everyone’s mind. They described things I could not even imagine. “If there were a God,” the summation always began in resolutely subjunctive mode, “such things could not happen.” We, in our turn, would try to explain what we did not then know was called “theodicy,” the problem of evil. I had been in the military myself—for six months—in California. My companion and I were Mormon American missionaries with a special message. We were not conscientious objectors, but we were in favor of peace. We were respectively nineteen and twenty years old.

In 1961, Elder Henry D. Moyle traveled throughout Europe, visiting missions. At a conference in Hamburg, he spoke for more than four hours, a talk that inspired me, a talk that would now be unthinkable. After promising, in what I would later come to recognize as missionary boilerplate, that if we worked harder, studied longer, made ourselves more receptive to the Spirit, we would baptize, he continued on with a truly exceptional question: “You want to teach the German people something about life and religion,” he said, shaking his head, “but what do you know about these people? How many of you have read anything by Johann Wolfgang Goethe?” There were more than two hundred missionaries in that room. Not a single hand went up. “How many have read Friedrich Schiller?” No one. “Gotthold Ephraim Lessing? Immanuel Kant? Friedrich Nietzsche?” We sat chastened and silent. He stared at us glumly. “The German people have a thousand years of history and culture. How do you think you are going to talk to them, get to their hearts and minds, when you know nothing about them?”

It seemed to me then a crucial question, and I hurried back to the small city of my first assignment, going straight to a bookstore. “I’ve got to read something basic and important in German literature,” I told the clerk. “Where do I start? What do you recommend?” The young man thought a while then handed me a thin paperback book, one that looked as though I might manage it. He assured me it was important. As a new missionary, I resolved to make it a staple in my daily regimen, and following language study, scripture study, and the endless memorizing of lessons, I found myself thumbing back and forth through Cassell’s German-English Dictionary and slowly reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Such reading is forbidden to missionaries today, and to me, then, it was surely disquieting. Like all of Kafka’s writing, the book’s core is religious, but it narrates a nightmare gospel in which all revelation is profane and condemnatory, and religion provides the precise antithesis to comfort.

I was fascinated, though not greatly enlightened, at nineteen. Still, the book gave me pause. It led me on to other books. It gave me something to challenge my certainties, and in an indirect way to help me appreciate the deep cultural mistrust of religion I encountered daily. I came to suspect as a missionary that it wasn’t so much that people failed to hear our message as that our message and manner were deeply disconnected from the realities that had ravaged their history and molded their thinking. We could talk to them—we did every day—but somehow not with them.

Thirty-eight years after my first arrival in Germany [as a missionary], I traveled with my wife to the former Soviet Zone. I had a grant to teach for a year at a university on the Baltic not far from the Polish border. Its new American Studies program was popular but very understaffed. There was plenty for me to do. The lds branch in the city was fledgling. With only nine members and four missionaries, it was barely staffed at all. We found ourselves needed and welcome at both institutions and quickly found friends. Yet those friendships arrayed themselves across an enormous divide, one of class as well as conviction. It is said of young European Mormons that at high school graduation, they face a Rubicon decision: either to remain faithful to their church or to pursue a higher education. One cannot, it is commonly understood, do both. And this parting is not just about Mormonism. I often warned my German students that if they ignored religion altogether, if they bracketed it out of their studies and thinking, they would never understand the United States, not its history, not its culture or literature, and certainly not its politics. Still, they resisted. The aversion was almost physical. When I recommended a book to my best, most ambitious student, one who read everything I suggested, everything she could get her hands on, she looked at her feet, “That’s the one you said was about religion.”

“Right,” I said.

She squirmed and kept her eyes on her toes. “I’d rather not.”

What, I wondered, is the problem? Is it still the war, over half a century later, or is it forty years of Communist indoctrination?

“It’s neither,” a colleague finally explained. “And it’s both. My friend, we like you very much. We are happy to have you here. But we have to shake our heads and forgive you your religion. To us, you are naive. When someone announces a plan of salvation, admonishes people to have and to live by faith, when this means obedience to some elect authority and requires commitment and sacrifice in this life for the sake of some better life to come—I have to tell you quite literally that in this country, we’ve heard that all before, twice just in this century. And if those messiahs were secular, all those before them came on behalf of the Lord with the same kind of talk and the same kind of thinking. It was all lies. And it makes our skin crawl.”

What does one say to so much lived history? How does a missionary approach someone so deeply and so reasonably wary?  I asked myself then and ask now how useful it is to chafe over “stiffneckedness” in people so existentially scarred. Are they really being arrogant and unteachable? Or have they, instead, learned a hard lesson for which we have neither trained ears to hear nor schooled eyes to see.

For the nurtured believer of affirmed and affirming religious origins, it is difficult to concede faith as the substance only of things hoped for, evidence only of things not seen. But in a larger world of compounding, countervailing, all-too-visible evidence, what could be more honest? For the world at large, we hardly speak with a voice of authority. Not only our persisting religiosity, but our persisting American-ness stand in the way. More than forty years later, another preemptive American war and American treatment of minorities still transfix and appall Europeans. Mormon cultural and institutional complicity are still not likely to impress them. The German people in particular have had to face down terrible sins of their own and the rationalizations that enabled them. They’ve developed a nose for hubris and a deep ideology aversion. Perhaps we must learn to proceed in some more respectful, less dogmatic and instructional way. Not because we are right, and not just because we are naive, but because we may, in fact, be needed—to provide sanctuary, to enable small miracles, to listen and reach out over the quite reasonable and growing divide between schooled disillusionment and improbable belief. It’s humbling work, demanding faith without privileging faith. We might have a hard lesson to learn. It may take a while.